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Saul Marquez:
Hey everybody! Saul Marquez with the Outcomes Rocket. I want to welcome you back to the podcast. Today I have an outstanding guest. His name is Lee Hudson Teslik. He is the founder and CEO of Reverence, a digital health company reinventing the way home-based care is managed. Lee started Reverence in 2022 to raise the quality and dignity of elder care, a mission inspired by firsthand family experience and invigorated by the pressing need to solve one of the most important issues faced by society today. Before Reverence, Lee spent several years as an operating executive at Google, and he also served time as a consultant at McKinsey and Company, where he focused on healthcare and private equity clients. So excited to have you here with us, Lee. Thank you for joining.
Lee Hudson Teslik:
Thank you for having me.
Saul Marquez:
Of course, and so, look, we like to get to know our guests, so talk to us. What inspires your work in healthcare?
Lee Hudson Teslik:
Yeah, no, absolutely. Like you said, it did come through naturally, through family experience. I had, amongst other things, a grandmother who sadly came down with very early onset Alzheimer’s, like started manifesting when she was in her late 40s, early 50s, and as a result, wound up requiring over 20 years of home-based support, a burden of which fell overwhelmingly on my grandfather. And I was very close to them, and I saw the whole thing up close and personal and drew a number of ideas out of it. At first, it was in many ways very beautiful that she was able to live out the remainder of her life there in the comfort of her home with loved ones and family all around, but it was also really challenging in a number of ways, not least of which came down to workforce and really trying to figure out how to get the right people supporting her there at the times when she needed it. And that’s what, we set out to solve some of those problems with Reverence, and that’s what we’re really all about.
Saul Marquez:
I love it, and as you think about Reverence, what are the things that make it unique and help it add value to the healthcare ecosystem?
Lee Hudson Teslik:
Yeah, for sure. I guess if we start from the premise that a whole lot of healthcare organizations, particularly those dealing with senior care, are struggling with staffing at the moment, we set out to solve and help our clients solve staffing challenges in what I think is a relatively unique way. We saw a lot of organizations really trying very hard over the last few years to just overwhelmingly going with approach of try to find more people. And you do need to try to find people, and in many ways, it’s the sort of intuitive thing to do when you’re facing a staffing crisis, but what we often saw was organizations doing that at the expense of doing something else or while not doing a whole lot on to something else. And the something else is how do you really get thoughtful about making the most of the resource you have, the most valuable resource you have, which is your existing workforce, and how do you deploy your existing workforce in a way that is efficient but also feels good for them so that you’re not churning people constantly and so that you’re hiring needs are diminished over time as a result. We at Reverence are overwhelmingly focused on that kind of second group of things. So how do we help healthcare organizations get smart in their management of their existing workforce?
Saul Marquez:
I think that’s fantastic, and oftentimes goes, not, I wouldn’t say unobserved, but under observed because we get so bogged down by how busy we are and understaffed that in business you say, hey, work on the business, not in the business. And it sounds like you use a combination of insights, maybe some tech to help people scale their capabilities.
Lee Hudson Teslik:
Absolutely. So we’re built around a core AI, and the function of that AI is essentially being really good at getting the right people in the right place at the right time. So matching practitioners to shifts in real-time and in the context of dynamic, difficult staffing situations. So a lot of that comes down to taking the work that a scheduler within a healthcare organization or a team of schedulers might be doing and automating some of that work and automating it in a way that makes it possible to do more quickly and in more complex staffing situations. And we are seeing more and more complex staffing situations where healthcare organizations are increasingly asking their schedulers to manage across, for instance, several different pools of types of staff, so full-time on-staff support, per diem workers, hourly workers, contract workforce. And they’re asking this sort of very complex exercise that their schedulers, which is help us manage in a strategic way across all these different pools of people, and frankly, it’s really tough. And that’s what our technology does, is take that work and automate all, a lot of it, and help organizations fill more shifts faster and in a way that feels good for both the workers and schedulers.
Saul Marquez:
That’s great. And look, I’ve spent a lot of time chatting with healthcare leaders, and that’s the people that listen to this podcast, and the big thing that keeps coming up is retention. What can I do to help retain my employees? When you use technology and insights like the ones you guys are, you’re able to do that. Can you speak to that?
Lee Hudson Teslik:
Sure, absolutely. One of the core reasons that we see people churning from healthcare organizations is not that they don’t want to work at the organization, but that in many instances, they actually just require a more flexible working schedule. Sometimes caregivers within a healthcare organization are also family caregivers within their own family, and they, for whatever reason, can’t possibly, at this point in time, work a 40-hour workweek or a 45-hour workweek or whatever it is that their employer is asking of them. They would love to give that employer 22 hours a week or 18 hours a week if the employer is able to create a sort of staffing operation that enables that, that creates more flexible modes of work. If the organization is not able to provide that, very often, we see those people leaving and signing up with local staffing agencies, sometimes in multiple staffing agencies, simply to find a way to create that flexible setup for themselves. But one of the things that we’re helping our organizations do is set up these more either per diem pools or hourly float pools that give workers who might otherwise leave. Or in some cases, workers who have already left away to come back and work in a more flexible way that works for them and allows them to work for one company that they really do work for, if you can make it work for them.
Saul Marquez:
That’s great. And it’s taking a look, and folks, this is so key, it’s taking a look at things, it’s not all or nothing. And you talk about the great resignation, there’s still a lot of caregivers out there that are bored and like they work for so long, and they need something to do, there’s a huge opportunity. And you know, what Lee’s saying is, how can you enable these flow pools that will power up your organization? And if your organization has the values, the mission that really people want to be part of, I think this is a really innovative solution to give people an in. You’ve been doing a lot of work across different verticals, and so curious what you’re seeing as maybe a setback that you ran into with this company that’s really helped you offer even more value than before the setback?
Lee Hudson Teslik:
Yeah, no, for sure. So we do work across several different verticals, so we work across home health and home care. We work with post-acute facilities, so skilled nursing facilities, assisted living facilities, etc. We also work with health systems at this point. One of the things we, very quickly, so when we first built the AI, we built it with a portal that provider groups can use as well as an app that practitioners can use. And we saw that some organizations were interested in that, but a number of others were actually quite happy with their existing workforce management systems because those workforce management systems do a bunch of different things. They integrate time and attendance and HR systems, and payroll, etc., etc. As reference, we had no desire to replace that whole swath of stuff. All we were saying is, hey, look, there’s a better way to do this really important function, which is getting the right people in the right place at the right times. So very quickly, we took that learning from the market and modularized the core AI that we work with and built APIs so that we could just plug it seamlessly into the back-end technology or into the existing work systems of our clients so that if they want, they can use Reverence’s technology in a way that’s actually completely invisible, but just turbocharges the scheduling system that they already have. I would say that’s one of the main things.
Saul Marquez:
That’s huge. And for a company to be able to do that, not dig your heels in the ground, find a way to actually maximize the existing capital investments, whether it’s software or existing infrastructure, like that’s the best way to really gain traction in the market. So kudos to you, Lee, and great news for all the folks listening is like, Reverence plugs right into what you do. What are you most excited about?
Lee Hudson Teslik:
Yeah, so look, I think the coming decade or decade and a half is going to be a decade of really significant change within the healthcare system. And I think there are things within it that you can be nervous about. I don’t think we’re going back to 2019. So if you’re a healthcare organization and you want to just have full-time on-staff people and meet all of your staffing support with those full-time on-staff people, I think that’s going to be difficult. But I also think that the silver lining to that, which is that I think there’s a lot of opportunity for innovative organizations to really get smart about workforce right now. And instead of just being faced with a staffing crisis as a crisis, to see this as an opportunity, an opportunity to get smart about staffing systems and staffing technology and things like, I like to talk in terms of shift mix, and a shift mixed strategy. So what proportion of your shift so you’re going to be filling with full-time people versus per diem versus hourly versus contracts? I think we have this excellent moment right now that really strategic folks shouldn’t let go to waste and can seize on and can really make their organizations stronger and more robust for the long term by latching on to this moment.
Saul Marquez:
That’s fantastic. That’s super exciting for sure. And for everybody listening, think about ways you too can make these types of shifts because the technology, the talent, it’s out there. Lee is evidence of that with the work he and his team are doing at Reverence. Lee, thanks for jumping on with us. Before we conclude, why don’t you just share with the listeners could get in touch with you and say goodbye?
Lee Hudson Teslik:
Yeah, absolutely. So we are online, obviously, at ReverenceCare.com. You can contact us through our website, you can also get in touch through our LinkedIn page, and we would be excited to speak with anyone who’s thinking critically about these problems.
Saul Marquez:
Outstanding. Lee, thank you so much. Look forward to chatting with you soon.
Lee Hudson Teslik:
Excellent. Thanks, Saul.
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